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Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Websphere Technical University Düsseldorf 2014 - First impressions

Impressions of the first day of the Websphere Technical University 2014 in Düsseldorf

The Websphere Technical University and Digital Experience conference is held in Düsseldorf from the 28th of october till the 31st. With over 16 rooms for each timeslot there is something to each person’s liking. My main interest for this conference is the integration track and even though this limits the immense choice of presentations, there are still some hard choices to be made.

For this first day I started the day with the general opening session. This featured a great demo that showed the power of Bluemix.

In the afternoon the conference really started for me with a presentation about the trends and directions of the IBM Integration Bus. Speaker Jens Diedrichsen (@JensDiedrichsen) introduced us the new features that will be present in IIB V 10.0

The following interesting session that I attended was the presentation by Klaus Bonnert about API management. In an existing Datapower environment, the API-management software can add some useful advantages without having to rewrite your API’s:

Analytics view

API manager can become your single console for all deployments

Self service for user creation

DFDL

My last session for the day was the session about DFDL (Data Format Description Language) by Alex Wood. Despite being present in MessageBroker since V8, I never really looked at it until now. Much like XSD is for XML, DFDL is a way to describe flatfile and binary data. It is a standard owned by OGF (https://www.ogf.org) and is the way to go for those who want to be able to validate or serialize general text and binary data format.

Some of the features of DFDL:

based on XML-schema (DFDL schema is valid xml)

human readable

high performance, since you can choose the data format that suits you best

github for many existing schemas that describe file formats like EDIFACT

currently used by message broker / IIB, rational, Master Data Mgmt

IBM DFDL also available as an embeddable component (latest release V1.1.1)